Hugo Bernatzik


Hugo Adolf Bernatzik, was an Austrian anthropologist and photographer.
Bernatzik was the founder of the concept of alternative anthropology.

Biography

Hugo Adolf Bernatzik was a son of the Professor of Public Law at the University of Vienna and member of the House of Peers, Edmund Bernatzik. After school in 1915, he volunteered to join the Austro–Hungarian Army and was deployed among other places in Albania. In 1920, he abandoned his medical studies for financial reasons and became a businessman. After the early death of his first wife Margarete Ast, he embarked on extensive travels and expeditions taking photographs, which became his profession and passion: Spain and north–west Africa in 1924; Egypt and Somalia in 1925; Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1927; Romania and Albania between 1926 and 1930; Portuguese Guinea in 1930–1931 ; British Solomon Islands, British New Guinea, as well as Bali in Indonesia in 1932–1933; Swedish Lapland in 1934; Burma, Thailand and French Indochina in 1936–1937; and, French–Morocco in 1949–1950.
Bernatzik financed his research and living expenses as a travel writer and freelance scientist, by publishing photo coverages, giving public slide lectures and purchasing collections for ethnological museums in Germany and Switzerland. His journalistic activity and his exceptional photographs of foreign people made him quite prominent. He prepared a worldwide photo archive of remote tribal people considered as threatened. With regard to colonial policies, Bernatzik argued that colonial administrators should take the customs, way of life and the tribal environment into account. In 1927, he married Emmy Winkler, a psychology student in Vienna, who became his assistant and travel companion. From 1930 on, he studied ethnology, anthropology and geography at the University of Vienna and completed a PhD doctorate in 1932 with a "monograph of the Kassanga". In June 1935, he applied for his postdoctoral habilitation to the University of Graz to be a professor based on the work he had done on "The development of the child on the Solomon Island of Owa Raha". He received confirmation from the Austrian Federal Ministry in May 1936 in Rangoon. Finally, at the beginning of 1939, he was appointed at the University of Graz to the Institute of Geography. Plans for another expedition to the Chinese province of Yunnan were cut short by Hitler's attack on Poland in September 1939.
Persistent speculation and rumours were aired regarding Bernatzik's role during the Third Reich and the Second World War. At the beginning of the war, Bernatzik was recruited into the Armed Forces and was stationed in Wiener Neustadt as a training officer for Air Defense. However, in explicit opposition to this war, he attempted everything possible to be released from this service, in order to publish a handbook on Africa. This project was designed to give colonial officers and European settlers a basic knowledge about the countries and their people. It was commissioned the NSDAP Office of Colonial Policy whose leader, Franz Ritter von Epp had been a general in Africa during the First World War. Impressed by Bernatzik's work, Ritter von Epp provided him with several recommendations during the war, which classified the Handbook of Africa as "war strategic material", despite the fact that the authorities in Berlin had quickly lost interest in the "colonial question". The protection of the general allowed Bernatzik, as well as many of his collaborators, to survive the war without too much loss.
However, none of Bernatzik's expeditions were in connection with any German colonial claim. The destinations, the data and his research interests make this evident. During the war, Bernatzik also worked on the completion of his most important publication, a monograph of Akha and Miao. Between 1940 and 1942, he travelled repeatedly to occupied Paris to cooperate with French ethnologists and to access various colonial archives for his work. He tried as far as possible to help persecuted colleagues at the Musee de l'Homme and to prevent the vandalism of archives and collections. Both completed manuscripts, the Africa Handbook and the monograph of Akha and Miao, were destroyed by a bomb attack damaging the Bibliographisches Institut of Leipzig in December 1943; moreover, all negatives of his photo archives burned in 1944, after a bombing of a railway station. Nevertheless, Bernatzik managed to publish without any textual change the "Handbook of Afrika" as well as "Akha and Miao" in 1947. The term "colonial ethnology" had already been replaced in 1944 with "applied ethnology".
Contrary to occasional assertions that Bernatzik had been an early member of the NSDAP, forbidden in Austria until the Anschluss in March 1938, his correspondence and documents from 1923 to 1944, which are accessible in the Vienna Library, prove that he joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1938. At the time, however, Austrians eager to join the party were restricted to new membership. Therefore, Bernatzik used a manipulated certificate referring to his alleged services provided for the party since 1933. This letter was attested to by a former school colleague, who had become a party official. Nonetheless Bernatzik's work, his research and position manifest no affinity whatsoever to Nazi Party ideology. Regardless of how one may judge his work today, at no time did it disclose NS propaganda. He never took any official position in the NS regime nor was he expected to do so. Despite this, from a current perspective, his lack of dissociation and some of his contacts can be legitimately criticized. But from his point of view during that epoch, he obviously considered his behavior as inevitable, as a means to proceed with his work and to defend himself against various denunciations, to which he was very exposed. As a freelance ethnologist, photographer and travel journalist the only possibility for him to escape the constraints of the regime would have been exile.
Hugo Bernatzik lived with his family in Heiligenstadt, Vienna in a villa commissioned by his father in 1911, built by the architect Josef Hoffmann and furnished by artists from the Wiener Werkstätte. He died in 1953 after many years of a tropical disease at the age of 56 years. He left important photographic work, accessible in Vienna at the Photographic Institute Bonartes, as well as numerous publications translated into many languages and re-edited until the 1960s. The following list of main works are itemized according to the date of their first edition and their English edition.

Works